It is not a guessing game, it is more of making educated assumptions and adjusting your strategy to suit the prevailing market conditions.There is more to this property investing business than meets the eye at first and obtaining a good understanding of investment fundamentals first, before investing in anything, is of vital importance.

It's not a horrible deal for you, but it has to fit your fundamentals and goals.

We all know that multi family has produced the greatest returns and has very strong fundamentals.

Learn the fundamentals in your own market before trying someone else's.  

That said, if you decide to go forward, make sure to double down on the fundamentals: understand your market, analyze a TON of potential deals before you buy, build a really strong team, and then think creatively on how you can work remotely.  

Forget cashflow (or rational appreciation), that city has long since passed sanity or anything relatively close to market fundamentals for you to want to touch real estate 'investments' with a 100-foot pole.If you can't tell, I could go on forever about the current status of the Canadian real estate market! 

As a beginner I think you should get your feet wet at least in beginning with a local investment to understand the fundamentals to investing.Investing out of state has it's challenges and can be cumbersome especially for a novice investor.That is just  my opinion, others may feel differently.best regards and good luck!!

I'm looking at it, and I THINK it'd work, but I can't help but feel that I'm missing something, or that there's something fundamentally flawed in my thought process that makes this unworkable.

All kinds of mixed signals but the REIT market is a proxy for the private market so let’s see what happens.With that said, you have to look at the fundamentals related to RE investing (i.e. job growth, affordability, unemployment, historical pricing, etc).

I want to master the fundamentals of valuing SFR and small multi-family properties.